ATTACHMENTS. WHAT WOULD YOU TAKE FROM A BURNING BUILDING?

James Raymond Fitzpatrick spent much of his life among the...

May 27, 2001|By Leah Eskin.

James Raymond Fitzpatrick spent much of his life among the dead. In high school, he worked, and sometimes slept, at a funeral home. As a 19-year-old Navy pharmacist's mate, he landed at Okinawa. His job was to sort through the bodies, and offer aid--or simply comfort--to the wounded. Back in Chicago, he drove around the city, selling burial vaults. "If I'd been booted from school I got to go with him," says his son, artist Tony Fitzpatrick. "He'd be [angry] for the first couple of hours. Then he'd tell me stories of every single neighborhood." He saved his war stories for last, as he was dying. "When he told me about being in the Navy, it completed the portrait," says Fitzpatrick, who pays homage to his father in the illustrated poem "Bum Town." "What he hated most was how inhuman war made people." James Fitzpatrick died in 1998. Tony Fitzpatrick has worn his dog tag since. "This represents the last piece of [his] history. I think I kept this thing for the best reasons."